


People Person

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Compromise, Dalish Elven Culture and Customs, F/F, Misjudgment, Sera Being Sera, Sera POV, culture clash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 13:26:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6755908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavellan has determined to drag the People into the Dragon Age by the ear, kicking and screaming if she has to. Even after months and months, Sera doesn’t always trust it. Sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	People Person

**Author's Note:**

> That's Ione-with-an-i, not lone-with-an-l.

The book’s _boring_ and _heavy_ and filled half with words she doesn’t know, half with squiggles and pictures that don’t make any sense, don’t even come off being _words_. Sera throws the book at the wall and a voice from Out There yells that it’s second bell in the morning, Andraste’s tits what is she even _doing_. She does not shoot an arrow through the cover and the pages and the other cover. Wants to.

Doesn’t.

Buckles would look at her all sad and long and tired and say something like _sorry_.

So Sera picks up the book and shoves it in-between a rose-painted vase and a broken rock with little sparkly rocks inside and doesn’t feel bad about bending the pages, scuffing the cover.

She scribbles in her journal and doesn’t sleep a whole lot, which is fine. She’s here and she’s out playing keep-away with old elfy demons and shite and _you-don’t-have-to-go-if-you-don’t-want-to-but-I-need-to_.

Ione Lavellan did not give her the book her keeper-whatever gave to her, but she didn’t hide it in her room and Sera has a key, now, so that’s permission to take what she likes and give it back. Eventually. Or find it gone from her room with a sigh and a note and _a tell me next time_ between smothering kisses, rougher than she usually is but can’t tell the truth saying she doesn’t _like_ that too.

  


She comes back with a bag of horror hearts she gives to Dagna, and Blackwall with a new elfy shield on his back and Bull limping and frowning and _Solas_ , walking around like he’s got secrets (like he _always_ does). Somehow even more of a stuck-up prig than usual, though.

Sera’ s about to sneak the book back into Buckles’ room when she corners her in hers, skinny bony body filling the doorway with a presence she shouldn’t have. That’s not the glowy bit; anyone else, it would be, but it’s not, it’s just that she expands to fill the space she’s in. Sera’s heart flutters. Piece of backward fletching that gives her–makes her–a wobbly arrow. Not Heraldy, maybe at first but she’s grown into it, or it’s grown into her. Sera shoves the stupid elfy book back onto a different shelf and doesn’t answer Buckles’ half-raised eyebrow.

She’s traded hearts for jam pies. _Buckleberry_ ones if she smells right, and she always does. Smell right. Like the lavender and mint she keeps in her dresser in _her_ room, even though she spends half her nights or more in this one.

No words just the scuffle-plop of the pies landing on the table, crack-click of the door kicked closed, Buckles’ mouth on hers and her hands on her arse and Sera’s in her hair, pulling the braid down from the roots. There’s no _I-missed-you-I-wish-you-had-come_ and no _I’m-glad you’re-not-dead-I-at-least-want-to-be-_ there _-if-you-die_ and she pushes Sera. Back and down onto the cushions, takes her hips and bites her thigh through her leggings.

It’s a better souvenir than anything from the moldy old temple that snatched two months of her lover’s life up and out of hers.

  


Naked, on the floor, sprawled on top of Sera, after. Ione Lavellan is tall for an elf and her arms are strong even though they’re more wire than muscle. She rests her weight on her forearms; their legs tangled and their thighs wet with each other’s slick.

Buckles kisses Sera’s cheek, and the side of her nose, and reaches back and up to the shelf where the book is. She frowns at the scuffed cover but it’s mostly between her eyebrows.

( _Blah-blah-precious-relic-of-our-people-irreplaceable-blah-blah-who-gives-a-shit?_ )

Instead she sets the book down and kneels up, scoots over, lies down. Her green tattoo’s gone smudged in places, where the tattooer didn’t care for good lines or something. Maybe she’s just older than Sera thinks she is, or got them younger, and she wonders what she’d look like without them. _Pretty_ , she thinks, _but not like her. Probably._

She waits for some boring story about the book and the clan and the secrets of ancient elvhen stories nobody knows all the details about, but instead she gets a drawn-in-eased out breath, tired-sounding. Not sex-tired, weary-tired.

“We can read maybe half of what’s in here,” she says, tucking the book beneath her head like an old hard pillow. “It used to make my cousin so _angry_. She wanted all of the words, exactly as the person who wrote them meant for us to receive them. Hated guessing.”

“Then why wasn’t _she_ First, or whatever?”

(Because clan politics are just like noble politics, just different names. The names for things and who does what, who’s big who’s small, that had come easy and it had stuck.)

“No magic,” Buckles says, shrugging. “She looked backward so damned much she didn’t notice when she’d walked into a tree.”

“Or a steaming pile of–”

“You’re going to say ‘halla shit,’ aren’t you?” she asks, retrieving a jam pie.

Sera cackles, and thinks she’ll keep this one.


End file.
